Tees Valley Publishers

Smokestack Books

Smokestack aims to keep open a space for what is left of the English radical poetic tradition in the twenty-first century. Smokestack champions poets who are unfashionable, radical, left-field and working a long way from the metropolitan centres of cultural authority. Smokestack is interested in the World as well as the Word; believes that poetry is a part of and not apart from society; argues that if poetry does not belong to everyone it is not poetry.

Smokestack's list includes books by Martin Rowson, Linda France, Katrina Porteous, Alison Fell, Kevin Cadwallender and Sebastian Barker. Smokestack's international list includes Martín Espada (Puerto Rico), Francis Combes (France), Kristin Dimitrova (Bulgaria), Gustavo Pereira (Venezuela), Jim Scully (USA) and Andras Mezei (Hungary), as well as new editions of radical classics by Heinrich Heine and Nicola Vaptsarov. Coming soon from Smokestack are books by Rocco Scotellaro (Italy), Giannis Ritsos (Greece) and Victor Jara (Chile).

‘Ah-oh, smokestack lightning, shinin' just like gold, Why don't ya hear me cryin'?' Howling Wolf

‘and on every side smokestacks were dancing on rooftops.' Vladimir Mayakovsky

‘The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack...
Type of the modern-emblem of motion and power-pulse of the continent,
For once come serve the Muse and merge in verse.' Walt Whitman

‘Smokestack is doing an excellent job' (Penniless Press)

'Smokestack books is a welcome addition to the poetry publishing world.' (Critical Survey)

‘don't assume that books from left of centre Middlesbrough press Smokestack will be about whippets and Federation ale.' (Sphinx)

‘Smokestack has a great squad of radical poets.' (Adrian Mitchell)

 

Contact Details:
w: www.smokestack-books.co.uk
t: +44 (0) 1642 813997
e: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
PO Box 408, Middlesbrough, TS5 6WA

 

LATEST PUBLICATIONS

Martin Rowson, The Limerickiad: Volume 1, from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare
ISBN 978-0-9568144-2-5
£9.99 hardback
Every week for the last five years, award-winning cartoonist and writer Martin Rowson has been telling the story of World Literature in The Independent on Sunday. In limericks. With scrupulous regard to the rigours of the limerick form, Rowson has reduced the classics to a series of bad jokes, cheap puns, strained scansion, excruciatingly contrived rhymes and pure filth. Collected together for the first time, The Limerickiad: Volume 1 takes us from the Sumerian classic Gilgamesh to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, with both verse and illustration displaying Rowson's reverence for the original texts. The Limerickiad promises to do for Literature what 1066 and All That did for History.

 

James Scully, Angel in Flames: Selected Poems & Translations, 1967-2011
ISBN 978-0-9564175-8-9
£8.95
Angel in Flames brings together, for the first time, the best of US writer James Scully's poetry from the 1960s - when it was claimed that Vietnamese villages had to be destroyed to be saved - to the 21st century state terror wars fought against civilian populations. Scully's poetry addresses head-on the intellectual and cultural degradation of an imperial order whose ambition appears to be to reduce the globe to a shrunken head on a stick.

Eric Doumerc and Roy McFarlane (eds) Celebrate Wha? Ten Black British Poets from the West Midlands
ISBN 978-0-9568144-0-1
£7.95
Celebrate Wha? is an anthology of poems about identity and race, curried goat ‘n' rice. Mixing dub, grime and performance poetry, anger and laughter, politics and music, Dreadlock Alien, Sue Brown, Marcia Calame, Evoke, Martin Glynn, Michelle Hubbard, Kokumo, Roy McFarlane, Chester Morrison and Moqapi Selassie explore what it means to be Black and British and from the West Midlands.

 

Paul Summers, union: new and selected poems
ISBN 978-0-9564175-9-6
£7.95
union brings together two decades of Paul Summers' poems, drawing on books and pamphlets, performance pieces and collaborations, as well as a long and previously unpublished sequence about the North of England, ‘broken land'. Summers is a poet of place and of travel, of exile and of home, a proud Northumbrian internationalist and a fervent celebrant of the idea of ‘we' - of community, people and hope - of the notion of union itself.

 

Chris Kinsey, Swarf
978-0-9564175-2-7
£7.95
BBC Wildlife Poet-of-the-Year Chris Kinsey turns her attention to human nature, especially
those whose lives are easily overlooked and under-valued. Drawing on her experiences working with the elderly, with excluded students and adults with learning disabilities, Swarf is a book about life in a small town, its mad Fridays, slow Sundays and long afternoons in the pub.

 

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